Next generation biodiversity analysis

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One of the oldest fields of biological science is taxonomy: the identification and description of biological species and their relationships to each other and their environments. Since Linnaeus first started the task 250 years ago, taxonomists have managed to describe roughly 2 million of the Earth's species. These species descriptions now play a key role in a wide variety of applications, from environmental biomonitoring to medicine to agriculture. A fundamental tenet of any monitoring program is that one cannot control what isn't measured, and the best estimates of the totality of Earth's biodiversity ranges from 10 million species to over 100 million. Clearly, scientists lack the required tools to create accurate and robust estimates of biodiversity. Moreover, species identification usually requires a lot of time, effort, and expertise even in those cases where formal species descriptions exist. DNA based approaches are poised to change all this: by analyzing short, standardized pieces of DNA-DNA barcodes--it is possible to uniquely identify nearly all the species on Earth with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Identifying every species living within a particular biome and monitoring their relative abundances over time would have been the stuff of science fiction ten years ago, but by combining the power of next-generation DNA sequencing with the large and diverse reference sequence libraries that have been produced, ambitious studies like these are now possible-and for a modest price. We propose to take advantage of advances in computer science and use computational analyses to store and analyze these DNA sequences in standard libraries that will then be used for monitoring species diversity in any environmental setting. We begin with two model systems. The first is freshwater invertebrate communities-the sort typically used in environmental analyses such as those performed by Environment Canada. Our second model system involves quantifying biodiversity among the tropical arthropods, an area that is widely believed to harbour the majority of the Earth's unknown biodiversity.